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Daniel Wallace (born 1959) is an American author, best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions - the basis for the Tim Burton film Big Fish.

Life

Wallace was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He has three sisters. He attended Emory University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, studying English and philosophy. His first job was at a vet, cleaning cages and squeezing anal glands. He did not graduate from college until May of 2008; instead took a job with a trading company in Nagoya, Japan.

Wallace states, of his childhood, that "I was completely average in every way. My childhood was the most uneventful part of my life, I think." He reports, however, that there was friction within his family, as in an interview he states:

"My father wanted me to work with him in his company, an import/export firm, and to that end I lived in Japan for a couple of years. But it didn’t work out. It didn’t make me happy and the truth is I wasn’t that good at it. I wouldn’t have been a good businessman. I tried. So I quit – or, if he were alive and you could ask him, fired – and started writing. He wasn’t for it but then it’s hard to support a child in an endeavor for which he has shown absolutely no promise. My mother loved the idea of it because being a writer is such a romantic idea and because it hurt my father, and if he was hurt she was happy."

After returning to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Wallace worked for thirteen years in a bookstore and as an illustrator before Big Fish was published. A running motif in his works are glass eyes; Wallace has stated in numerous interviews (including the one published in the back of the paperback edition of Big Fish) that he collects glass eyes. He continues to live in Chapel Hill with his wife, Laura, a social worker, and their son, Henry.

Of his political beliefs, Wallace has stated, "It is fair to say that I’m left of center. Far left." Wallace claims he is an agnostic in terms of religious beliefs, although he states:

"I think a lot of people default to Jesus when something inexplicable happens. I write things I didn’t know I was capable of writing, and sometimes that feels like magic. It isn’t; it’s just me. A similar thing happens when a tornado blows someone’s house away, but their cat is found unscathed in an oak tree: God must have been looking out for Pooky. We’re hard-wired to do this, I think, because we’ve been doing it since the beginning."

Career

Wallace is a distinguished professor and lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has no real opinion on current literary criticism. Of his career as a teacher, Wallace has stated:

"Teaching undergraduates is a much different than teaching graduate or post-graduate students. My job is to foster an appreciation for the art of writing. Showing a student what’s behind the curtain, so he’ll at least be able to see and appreciate these things when he reads a book. If he chooses to write himself – and of course, very few undergraduates pursue writing beyond this level – he knows some of the very basic devices used to creating a compelling story. Rarely does a student leave our program homogenized: even if that were something we wanted to do, we just don’t have them long enough."

Writing

Wallace believes that "art is a distillation of experience." He believes that "writing requires only a pen and paper, and not paint, brushes, canvases, nor expensive film or photographic equipment, so it’s seen as something ‘anyone can do.’"

Of his early writings, Wallace claims:

"I thought I was a much better writer then than I do now. I loved the stories I was coming up with, and was really amazed I could put enough sentences together to make a paragraph. It was like magic, seeing the little black marks all come together. I sound like I’m making fun of myself but I’m not. If a writer writes I was a writer. I couldn’t see very far beyond that though. The pure pleasure of invention, of making stuff up, clouded over everything else. I couldn’t tell the difference between a good story and a good story told well. I wrote three hundred pages about a pair of billionaire twins, each weighing just over 500 pounds, who ‘rent’ the mistress of one of their friends. What did I think was going to come of that? Nothing much did. And I wrote a few other books equally as promising. As I wrote I was learning to write (having not gone to school) and I was learning what not to write as well. I also finally figured out that I was writing the kind of books I thought other people wanted to read, not the kind I wanted to write. That’s when Big Fish happened, and why it was a breakthrough for me."

As a child he loved the science fiction novel Dune, by Frank Herbert. Wallace lists as his favorite writers Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Faulkner. Wallace also loves the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr Bridge by Evan S. Connell.

In a 2008 interview with Dan Schneider , Wallace wrote, of his writing life:

"I’ve been writing for a long time. After leaving college I worked for a trading company in in Nagoya, Japan. It was called Nikko Boeki. My father got me the job. His company, Wallace International, was their biggest client...when my time there was up I told my father I wouldn’t be able to work for him in Birmingham...That’s when I thought I’d give writing a try. I don’t know why I decided to do this. I wasn’t a good writer. I didn’t have any obvious talent for it. No one ever took me aside and told me I was talented, or that writing – or any art, for that matter – was something I should consider pursuing. It wasn’t a calling. I didn’t feel, and never have felt, that I have something ‘to say,’ or anymore to say than anybody else. Why I wanted to do it, or ever thought I could do it, is the greatest mystery...After ten years of writing, I’d published about a dozen short stories. This is after ten years of writing every day, hours a day. I’d also written three novels, all of which were bad in about a thousand different ways. Then I wrote two more bad novels. When I wrote my first published novel, Big Fish, I was closer to 40 than 30, and I’d been writing for fourteen years."

Bibliography

• Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions (1998)
• Ray in Reverse (2000)
• The Watermelon King (2003)
• O Great Rosenfeld! a.k.a. O Great Rosenfeld!: In Which Our Esteemed Leader, Rosenfeld, and His Tribe of 33 and 1/2 Followers Find Themselves Trapped Between a Bunch of Very Dangerous ... After Sally, the Most Beautiful Woman (2005)
• O Great Rosenfeld! Part the 2 a.k.a. O Great Rosenfeld! Part the 2: In Which Wilson Learns to Cartwheel and All is Seems Lost Only to be Saved at Very Nearly the Last Second by Love (2005)
• Off the Map (2005)
• Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician (2007)

References

1. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
2. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
3. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
4. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
5. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
6. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008
7. The Dan Schneider Interview 12: Daniel Wallace 29 May, 2008

External links

• Wallace's website
• Inventory of the Daniel Wallace Papers, 1977-2007, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill
• Daniel Wallace at IMDb
• In depth interview with Daniel Wallace
• Strange Horizons interview
• Independent Weekly interview
• Southern Literary Review interview
• USAToday interview

• 1959 births
• Living people
• American novelists
• People from Birmingham, Alabama
• People from Chapel Hill, North Carolina